Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare ReformAuthor(s): Katherine S. NewmanSource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 762-778Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/683612 .Accessed: 11/03/2011 10:12

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KATHERINE S. NEWMAN Malcolm Wiener Professor of Urban Studies Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138

Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform

Drawing on fieldwork in Harlem at the onset of welfare reform, I argue in this article for both a social structural and a cultural ap- proach to the study of poor families facing the consequences of this historic policy change. Ethnographic understanding of house- hold organization, kinship networks, reciprocal dependencies, intergenerational relations, migration, and gender must be brought to bear if we are to chart the responses of the poor to welfare reform. Meaning and perceived intentions must be central if we are to grasp how the targets of policy change understand the new economic and bureaucratic circumstances of their lives. These themes are illustrated by drawing on accounts of several households in Harlem-African American and Latino-in order to explore how both structural and cultural forces may shape responses to welfare reform. [welfare reform, poverty, household organization, work- ing poor]

As most anthropologists readily recognize, welfare reform arrived as yet one more difficulty in the steady stream of burdens and dilemmas that consti-

tute the daily lives of the poor. To be sure, the loss of all forms of public assistance is a more profound challenge than many others encountered by impoverished families in inner-city enclaves, rural communities, and even pockets of suburban poverty. But it would be wrong at the outset to assume that welfare reform is understood by its targets as a unique event. As many researchers have shown (Edin and Lein 1997; Rank 1995), recipients of public assistance are constantly faced with inexplicable terminations of their benefits, the shutdown of utilities, demands for paperwork from 1,000 directions, unexpected evictions, and intrusive surveillance of their behavior in the job market or as par- ents. Scrambling, arguing, contesting, and being confused by and acquiescing to the changing demands of the welfare bureaucracy was a fact of life for families on Aid to Fami- lies with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Among families reliant on public assistance, AFDC- and its successor, Transitional Assistance for Needy Fami- lies (TANF)-is but one resource among many that add up to a complex survival strategy. The term welfare depend- ent never captured the intricacy of these systems of suste- nance, for the rest of the package was, and remains to this day, invisible to state authorities or survey researchers. As Carol Stack's (1974) classic All Our Kin showed so long ago, welfare payments entered a highly variegated social structure that strung family and friends into a web of recip- rocal ties. A well-oiled sharing system of the kind she de-

scribes reacts on a daily basis to the appearance and disap- pearance of funds, demands from significant others, and in-kind trades, managing funds that may be infused or withdrawn as the vagaries of life dictate.

One might be tempted to conclude that the end of the AFDC system has therefore made little difference. The so- cial networks that provision the poor simply shook welfare out of their systems and moved on. For those extended families and fictive kin who were fortunate enough to have other resources to shift toward, this may well have been the case. However, for others who participate in a carefully calibrated set of reciprocal exchanges and have little else to inject in the place of TANF, more calamitous outcomes may befall both the intended targets of welfare reform and a host of innocent bystanders. Indeed, millions of Ameri- cans who were active participants in the low-wage labor market all along or who were in school trying to compile credentials that would facilitate an escape from working poverty may find themselves unable to "play by the rules" as a result of legislative edicts that were never aimed at them.

This article draws on a two-year study of low-wage workers and job seekers in the fast food industry in Har- lem. Conducted between 1993 and 1995, this fieldwork in- volved a variety of methods developed and implemented by a multiracial and multiethnic research team. We began with face-to-face interviews of 200 workers employed in four restaurants in central and western Harlem. In 1995, we added an additional set of ethnographic interviews with 93 people who had applied to and been rejected for the same

American Anthropologist 103(3):762-778. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 763

jobs that our sample of 200 now held. For both sets of in- formants, the initial interview collected basic demographic data on the households in which these workers resided, as well as extensive information on skills, employment expe- rience, educational history, migration profile, wage his- tory, and experience with the welfare system. From these interviews, we learned about how many jobs these workers had applied for, how far their job search had taken them from the neighborhoods where they lived, and what their parents and siblings did for a living.

From the population of workers, we selected on a ran- dom basis 60 persons for longer, life history interviews. These tape-recorded interviews took between three and five hours to complete and dwelled at length on family his- tory; changes in the neighborhoods where these informants had grown up; and their perceptions of the labor market, of the role of race in the distribution of opportunity in the work world, of the welfare system as it existed at the time, and of the survival strategies of their own households and extended family members. Ten people were selected from among the 60 who were in this life history group for "shadowing," a form of fieldwork that placed each of them at the center of a concentric circle of family members, friends, teachers, ministers, employers, and neighborhood residents, who participated in this project over a year-long period. The cases discussed at length in this article are drawn from among these "shadowees."'

Our fieldwork focused on the working poor and was not intended to dwell on welfare recipients at all. Nonetheless, the two domains-the working poor and recipients of AFDC-proved to be sufficiently intertwined so that even a study explicitly focused on low-wage workers took into its purview many families that were receiving welfare and wages. Indeed, about 25 percent of the fast food workers we surveyed in Harlem were living in households where someone, usually their mothers, was receiving public aid (Newman 1999; Newman and Ellis 1999). An examination of the complexities of households in which both employ- ment and public assistance play a vital role in sustaining poor families provides some appreciation for the potential, unanticipated consequences of welfare reform.

Toward this end, I detail the ethnographic context sur- rounding several Harlem families-African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican-for which both welfare and earnings (legitimate and underground) were central to survival. My purpose here is first to explore the complex intertwining of work, welfare, and further education and to suggest some of the ways in which the dismantling of the AFDC system may drag the working poor down along with the "welfare dependent"; and second to suggest the domains within which anthropological scholarship might add to a national understanding of the impact of this his- toric change in the safety net.

Since the data collected for this article predate the onset of time-limited welfare-a process rolling out gradually in most states in 1999 and beyond--definitive accounts of the impact of welfare reform cannot be provided. Even where time limits have begun to take hold, the persistence of ex- traordinarily tight labor markets through the end of the 1990s and the record decline in welfare rolls, spurred not by cutoffs but by increased bureaucratic hurdles to entry into the TANF system, have made it difficult for any re- searcher to know what the real, long-term consequences of this historic change in federal policy will mean for poor families. If and when this remarkable period of economic growth slows to something closer to the norms of the past 20 years, we will be able to see more clearly what the change in the system has meant to poor families. What this article contributes for now, however, is a conceptual un- derstanding drawn from pre-reform fieldwork of what we might expect the long-term consequences of the end of AFDC to be.

Kyesha's Dilemma

Kyesha Smith, a 21-year-old African American living in a Harlem housing project, lies at the center of a complex family tree composed of members receiving welfare, workers in a wide variety of occupations, retired men and women, members of the military, children of various ages, and foster care dependents. Kyesha had worked in the same fast food restaurant in Harlem for five years by the time we met, but she was earning only $5 an hour despite the skills she had built up over that period of time and the high school diploma she had earned. As the kinship chart (Figure 1) shows, Kyesha is the oldest child living in the household headed by her mother, Dana, a 41-year-old black woman with five other children still living at home and a number of others out on their own.

Dana has been a continuous AFDC recipient since she had her first child, Kyesha's oldest brother, Reggie, at the age of 15. During the course of my research, Dana gave birth to her seventh child, who was several years younger than Dana's youngest grandchild. Dana did not graduate from high school. Her experience with formal employment was of very brief duration and a very long time ago. She has been, for all practical purposes, a career recipient of public assistance. Hence, Dana is precisely the kind of per- son that architects of welfare legislation had in mind as the target of their reform efforts. Indeed, during the two years I studied this family, welfare authorities had come after Dana in an effort to enroll her in a workfare program, which she deflected on the grounds that her youngest child was too young (and then too ill). Pressure was clearly building for Dana to enter the labor force.

Had she done so, problems would immediately have cropped up for Kyesha. For this young worker had a child of her own, Anthony, then two years old, whose full-time

764 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 2001

child care consisted of Dana, period. Dana took care of her own young children and added Kyesha's son to the mix. In exchange, Kyesha deeded over some of her earnings to Dana. Given Kyesha's low earnings, she would have been hard pressed to pay for commercial or even subsidized public child care, no matter how inexpensive or available it might have been-and in New York City day care was nei- ther. Dana's availability made it possible for Kyesha to re- main in the labor market. Indeed, in the summer (thanks to Dana's connections), Kyesha picked up a second job doing cleaning and maintenance around the housing project where they lived.

Kyesha's intensive level of participation in the formal labor market was made possible by the fact that her mother was, in truth, a state-funded child care worker. Dana's wel- fare check was a kind of wage for the labor she provided to Kyesha, who kicked in part of her own salary to support the household in which they both lived. The arrangement was hardly unique: Most of the "welfare mothers" who en- tered this study through the side door-as relatives of workers or job seekers-were doing child care for extra money. None of their "clients" could pay the prevailing wage for this work; hence, the welfare system was provid- ing a hefty subsidy for the labor these mothers were pro- viding to their own daughters and neighbors for the care of their children.

Dana was not the only welfare recipient (or state-funded child care worker, depending on how one looks at her real position) whose status affected young Anthony. Through the kinship ties of his father, Juan (a fellow worker in the fast food trade), the little boy had access to another grand- mother. Juan's mother, Graciela, born in Puerto Rico but a long-time resident of the South Bronx, took her grandson in on weekends. This permitted Dana to take a bit of a break and gave Juan a chance to spend time with his son. Like Dana, Graciela had been a longtime welfare recipient. Unlike Dana, however, she stopped having children long ago, so that when the authorities came looking for her to join the workfare program and, eventually, to push her off of AFDC altogether, she had no shelter from their de- mands. Gone was the weekend child care for little An- thony. Juan, like his ex-girlfriend Kyesha, was in demand as a weekend shift worker, and since he faced persistent re- quests for support from Kyesha and from his own mother, Juan was not available for child care responsibilities either. He was on the shop floor.

It bears notice that the other members of Kyesha's ex- tended family, her step siblings by a common-law father who comes and goes from their lives in a rather irregular pattern, were neither old enough to provide child care nor old enough to be fully on their own. Indeed, Irene (age 11), Juney (7), Jimona (6), and their foster sister, Sandra (5), re- quired adult supervision after school and in the evening hours. This need would most likely go unmet if Dana were unavailable.

Looking closely at Kyesha's family tree, however, it is clear that there are resources to be tapped in her extended family network. We commonly assume that poor residents of inner-city neighborhoods are "persistently," intergen- erationally poor. Yet a close read of this family's occupa- tional history shows that among the oldest living genera- tion one sees a fair number of people who have had solid careers. Evie, Dana's mother, has worked for the postal service for her entire adult life. Her husband had a job parking cars in a commercial garage. On the strength of their income, they were able to move out of the city to a segregated suburb on Long Island. Some of their children (Dana's siblings) have done quite well also: One daughter (Mary) is a medical secretary, Beth is a corrections officer, and Nell married a truck driver. Yet others have no formal employment.

Kyesha represents a downwardly mobile generation, which has come through a much harder economic period than her grandmother's generation, beneficiary of the ex- pansive 1960s. Although government jobs (and military opportunities) were relatively plentiful for Evie's genera- tion and even for Dana's siblings, they have become much harder to find among Kyesha's age-mates.

Kyesha's father, who died some years ago, was a Greek immigrant who had many children by another wife. Some of these step siblings on Kyesha's father's side have done well for themselves as well. Several have become postal workers; others have gone into the military. Yet it is no- ticeable among her step siblings, on all sides, that those men who did not find their way into the military have found themselves in jail. Three of Kyesha's stepbrothers have been or are presently in jail for drug convictions. One of them continues to deal at a high level and makes a great deal of money by Kyesha's standards, though Kyesha and Dana both consider these ill-gotten gains "dirty money" and not welcome in their home. Some of her sisters make a living braiding hair or baby-sitting, underground jobs that keep them on the right side of the law. The variation in the occupational outcomes of Kyesha's siblings is noticeable but not remarkable. Most of the poor families I have stud- ied over time show the same kind of variation in sibling sets, with success stories mixed in with sad cases in a pat- tern that challenges explanations emphasizing environ- mental context.

Standing back from the ethnographic detail of Kyesha's kinship chart, it seems clear that on the eve of welfare re- form her own household was "holding it together" on the basis of a stable, but delicate, balance. The combination of Kyesha's low-wage work, Dana's welfare, and subsidized public housing was working reasonably well but only be- cause all these pieces were in place. That said, there were reasons to be concerned about the long-term viability of the arrangements even without the threat of welfare reform. Kyesha's son and her siblings were safe and fed but not ex- actly prospering. Dana's preferred mode of baby-sitting-

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 765

plunking the kids in front of a TV tuned to daytime soap operas-was not likely to ready them for school with the kinds of social skills and understanding of letters and num- bers that more advantaged children might have.

While Kyesha, at 21, was reasonably content with her situation most of the time, tempers were rising in her household as she and her mother vied for authority over her son, sparring over the question of "who is really in charge here." Moreover, as Dana wanted a larger contribu- tion to the central coffers, Kyesha wanted to squirrel away as much as possible, particularly of her tax refunds. The si- lent, and not-so-silent, tug-of-war over finances did not en- courage Dana to extend her child care responsibilities be- yond the minimum. Once Graciela, little Anthony's other grandmother, was out of the picture, Dana was especially unwilling to do weekend baby-sitting, which meant Kyesha could no longer work so many hours. Her take- home income declined as a result.

Reynaldo's Dilemmas

Reynaldo Linaro, whose mother is Puerto Rican and whose father is from Ecuador, is a jack-of-all-trades who worked for a brief time in a fast food restaurant in Harlem in between various hustles as a nonunion electrician, car repairman, carpenter, and cellular phone dealer for fellow Latinos in his Washington Heights neighborhood. A tall, stocky young man with a love of baggy pants and gold chains, Rey is a classic entrepreneur. He mixes and matches his job opportunities-picking up anything he can get on the side. For a time he had a job stocking shelves in a drug store, but during his off-hours he made money fix- ing up broken-down cars for neighbors and rewiring the electrical system in a vacant apartment for his landlord. Rey works all the hours that are not consumed by school, his girlfriend, and hanging out with his younger brother.

No doubt he is influenced in his own brand of "worka- holism" by the example of his dad, who taught him much of what he knows about electronics and machine repair.2 Ernie Linaro never met a mechanical device he could not tear down to the foundation and rebuild just like new. Out- side on the street curb sit the broken-down Fords, Dodge four-doors, and GM cars that await his attention. His auto repair shop is just the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, but everyone in the neighborhood knows that this is a business venue. Emrnie is forever walking around with a cloth in his hands, wiping away the grease and oil from the pistons of an old car he has torn apart and made whole again. The shelves of the family's back room are crammed with blowtorches, pliers, hammers, wrenches, reels of plastic-coated wiring-all the tools of the trade needed to fix the long line of radios and TV sets that friends and friends of friends have left behind for repair.

As if he was not busy enough, Ernie has a lively sideline as an off-the-books contractor, renovating apartments des-

tined for immigrant families just like his own. Old apart- ment buildings in his neighborhood are forever flooding from broken-down pipes, their plaster weeping off the walls, mosaic tiles missing, caulking cracked and flaking, windows shattered and taped. Landlords claim to have lit- tle money for keeping apartments up to code and in any case prefer to use local workers and avoid union labor. Their preferences keep Emie in work as the apartments turn over. In turn, Ernie has kept Rey at his side and taught him everything he knows so he can turn over some of the work he has no time for, maintaining the opportunity "in the family."

Rey's mother, Magdalena, is a mature student working toward an A.A. degree that will, she hopes, make it possi- ble for her to work in computer administration someday. The cost of her schooling has been subsidized by public as- sistance, which during the period of our fieldwork permit- ted women on welfare to go to college. After many years of working in a bra factory, she had come to understand the importance of higher education and was determined to ac- cumulate credentials that would permit her to graduate from low-wage jobs to those with better pay.

While Magdalena has worked in factories for many years, she stakes her future on the prospect of finding a bet- ter job when she has some credentials to show for herself. Meanwhile, it is the entrepreneurial spirit of the men in the household and the support of the AFDC system that has kept the family going. Between them, father and sons earn enough in the (nontaxed) underground economy and the formal (wage-labor) system to keep the family at a lower- working-class standard of living as long as Magdalena's income is added to the mix. They have nothing to spare, they cannot do without any of these sources of income, but they are not starving. They can even hope that the youngest child will be able to get through high school and make it into a public college, something that will require heavy doses of financial aid, but it is not an unthinkable goal.

It might be tempting for pundits to look at the Linaro family as an inner-city exception, an icon of middle-class virtue. The two-parent family, the loving brothers, and the entrepreneurial energy all add up to an admirable portrait of a stable, supportive circle of kin pulling together. And there is much truth to the view. Yet Rey's parents are offi- cially divorced. They "broke up" years ago in order to qualify the household for welfare. Emie maintains an offi- cial address elsewhere, though he continues to live with his family, as he always has.

If we were to look at an official government census of Rey's household, we would find the adults within classi- fied as out of the labor force. Indeed, it would be deemed a single-parent household supported by the welfare system. Harlem is populated by thousands of families whose offi- cial profiles look just like this. Yet there is a steady income stream coming into the Linaro home because most of the

766 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 2001

* All of Dana's sisters and her mother, Evie, live in the same town on Long Island, but they all grew up in the project where Dana now lives. Dana, Cara, Mary, and Nell were born in Virginia. A =O * Evie and Harry formerly owned a home on Long Island. They sold it to Beth for $ioo,ooo and moved to an apartment complex. Evie kicked out all of her children but Therese, her youngest daughter, because they were too much to handle. Nell and her family have since moved back in. * Harry was like a father to most of Evie's kids.

Corey Douglass I MELVA Niko Harry EVIE WILLIAM (dec.) I Works in (dec.) 1 (65) (57+) SMITH

a nursing (Greek) I Parked cars Mail I (Lives in home in same carrier Virginia)

I Lives in Manhattan Kyesha's I garage for building years

A A= I A , Th (25) - Servedat Stuart I Edith I Adam Colette Victor Ilene No job Ft. Bragg

m In the 'Drug In the *No job * Basket- I Vice Once - Training to

military problem military ball president, I worked with drive truck bal Ip Iworked with drive truck player I major I I retarded with Jordan I inmid- I bankin people west I NYC

p l

Kirk Nyla : Adam,Jr. Sheena L

-...J L- - - - Attends Penn State L__ ael oy

r0----------------------

Kashina I LARRY I DANA Jim (dec.) (deceased) (41) Bus * Worked in a garage Public driver

* Owned a candy I assis- I store at one time tance I

(Unkn) Drug problem

Trile /, 0I0/I 0

(Unkn) Brian Pete Lima Matt Dean Juan KYESHA Irene Louise Jimona Jimmy (38) (21) Public ' (28) (24) Marvin *Cook (22) (n) (Infant) (6) (3) i Drug assis- I Was in Postal (3os) in Crew-

dealer tance the worker * Drug same trainer military dealer restau-

r

in fast rant as I food B" O O Kyesha o restau-

rant (Unkn) Janine Mark Dora Doris! Diana Jeanie Kendra Alfred Sandra

(4) (36) (31) (31) I (31) (27) (22) (19) (13) Hasan Wasin

? Has 1 Hs Has 3 l Has 1 Does Housing Drug ?

Foster child office the son kids i daughter hair cop dealer since 9/94 job in military Postal * Public * Works Attends

? Now in Anthony

NYC worker assis- at World John Jay work (2) tance I Trade Law release I

L---- I- Center School program L- - - -

?Married upstate

to an accountant

Figure 1. Kyesha's family tree, 1995.

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 767

KEY: Married couple Divorced couple Consensual couple

- Formerly consensual couple

? Either consensual or married (not sure)

r Household unit

0 0 Kathy Sonny Courtney (lives in (dec.) Preacher Virginia) - Was in the military Frankie I Left money to Evie

and Sonny, Jr. roble

Sonny, Jr.

r - f------------------r------------------

9II I =A I- = A A Mary Andy Caras Darryl1 Beth Jordan Ray I Nell Jack iMartin Jill Bill (43) -Veteran (40) (35) Truck I (38) Truckde Drug (34) Con-

Emmett *Medical * Cor- driver No job driver dealer * Braids tractoA -Drug secretary rections hair problem officer

I I I I I I g -------- -------I I I I I I

Alex Diane I Reggie Tina Walter Nina Terrence Nat Jackie Jeremy Melvia Anna (25) (25) (26) Public I In (21) (dec.)

* Cleans Works Drug assis- college *Public trains for I dealer tance i Plays assis- for music Is i foot- tance I LIRR distrib- I ball

utor II L -- -- -- - - ----- L-----------------.4 L -- -- -- ----------J

I I

!,I

I I

II II II I II I I

L.--------J L -------- J JL-----------

768 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 2001

adults are indeed working, often in the mostly unregulated economy of small-scale services and self-employment, in- cluding home-based seamstresses, food vendors, gypsy cab drivers, and carpenters.3 Most of this income never sees the tax man.

This underground world has been described primarily as the province of drug dealers and other assorted shady char- acters (Bourgois 1996). Yet for thousands of poor people in New York who cannot afford a unionized plumber or electrician, unlicensed craftspeople and informal service workers (who provide child care or personal services) are more important exemplars of the shadow economy. Men like Rey and his father provide reasonably priced services and products, making it possible for people who would otherwise have to do without to get their cars fixed, their leaking roofs patched, or their children looked after. Immi- grants who lack legal papers find employment in this shadow world, and those who are legal take second jobs in the underground economy.

Whether we look at employment or "family structure," the Linaro household departs from the normative model of the nuclear family. The statistical observer or census taker might lump this family together with other families that have dissolved or have been out of the labor force for many years, but anyone who is paying closer attention will see that this makes no sense. Kinship means everything to the Linaros. Their values place work and family at the center of their own culture in a form that would be embraced even by conservative forces in American society. Men are at least as committed to these norms as women in this Latino family.

Yet it is also the case that the long-term fortunes of Magdalena depend on the welfare system as a way of fund- ing her education. Now that recipients are required to work rather than go to school, and tuition is rising sharply, she may have no choice but to abandon Plan A. Rey's mom may not face the hardship that will probably land on Kyesha's household in the wake of welfare reform because there are no longer very young children in the Linaro home and because there are more earners to whom responsibility could be spread when public assistance terminates. How- ever, the long-range future may find the family closer to working poverty than to working-class status if the end of welfare means the end of higher education for Magdalena. She may be faced with the prospect of returning to the low- skilled jobs she is trying to leave behind. Beyond that, the increased need for earnings (to replace the lost welfare) will obligate her children to continue contributing to their parents' coffers in order to keep the whole family afloat. As in so many other immigrant families, the requirements of daily survival may compel young people who would like to start households of their own or head off to higher education to forego these opportunities in favor of the natal family (Newman 1999). While these are manageable bur- dens in the teens and early twenties, they develop into

sources of tension and frustration when first-generation Americans like Rey crest into their midtwenties only to dis- cover that they cannot cut the apron strings.

Enter Welfare Reform

How likely is it that Kyesha's mother, Dana, would be able to find a job given her profile: a long-time welfare re- cipient, high school dropout, with no recent work experi- ence (see Newman and Lennon 1995)? What are the chances Kyesha could replace Dana's child care services given her low wages? What will happen to the Linaro fam- ily over the long run if Magdalena is unable to push be- yond the low-wage labor market? The consequences of welfare reform differ dramatically depending on the an- swers to these questions, answers that vary considerably based on labor market conditions and child care availabil- ity, which differ from one poverty area to another.

In New York City, the picture is not encouraging. Al- though the city's economy is doing much better than it was ten years ago, it is fair to say that it has never fully recov- ered from the recession of the early 1990s. Unemployment remains quite high: a city average of 7 percent as of 1999. In this New York differs dramatically from communities like Milwaukee or Boston, where labor markets have tight- ened markedly.

Yet the inner-city neighborhoods, even of these boom- towns, still sport high levels of unemployment, even as conditions around them have improved. During the period when these ethnographic data were collected, official un- employment in central Harlem topped 18 percent, nearly double the citywide average, a reflection of racial segrega- tion, low levels of educational attainment, and the erosion of the job base. In this Harlem reflects a larger national problem: 74 central cities in the United States face contin- ued high levels of unemployment and persistent poverty, even in an era of general prosperity (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1999:5). Couple these conditions with the nationwide collapse in demand for low-skilled workers, and we find that even minimum- wage jobs are highly sought after. The central Harlem la- bor market was showing all the signs of saturation, long before welfare reform was on the table. The ratio of job seekers to successful job recipients for fast food employ- ment in central Harlem was 14 to 1.4 Employers could be picky under these circumstances, and the incumbents of these entry-level jobs reflected this advantage. High school graduates and older workers were favored over high school dropouts like Dana. Very young workers (like Kyesha's younger siblings) were losing out to more experienced and stable applicants in their midtwenties. Over one-half of this minimum-wage labor force was over 25 years of age.

Wages were dragged down by this oversupply. Kyesha had worked for one fast food restaurant for five years and was only earning 25 cents above the minimum wage even

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 769

though she was regarded as an indispensable worker. The only pressure to increase her income developed because of the federal increase in the minimum wage. Absent this, neither Kyesha nor any of her friends in the fast food in- dustry would have seen an improvement in their earnings. There are simply too many people standing outside the door, ready to take her place, and too few better places willing to take a chance on her.

Ironically, the very same job on Long Island was paying $3 per hour more than Kyesha earned.' In an all-too-famil- iar pattern of mismatch, job growth has been dramatic in the suburban communities surrounding New York. Tight labor markets in Connecticut, New Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester County have sent employers scrambling to find workers. Innovative busing programs are bringing workers from inner-city Hartford into Connecticut sub- urbs. Westchester businesses are recruiting from southern Connecticut towns.

Yet it is unclear how much of this good news is chang- ing the labor market conditions in Harlem, the South Bronx, or Bedford-Stuyvesant. Richard Freeman's (1999) work points out that in neighborhoods with high poverty rates where unemployment has been low in the last four years, labor market conditions for minorities are improv- ing. The trends are beneficial particularly for young black men who are traditionally the hardest hit by lack of job op- portunities and low levels of skill. Yet, as Freeman shows, workers from these neighborhoods are still at the bottom of the queue and minority unemployment remains more than double the rate for whites. Employers look on immigrants with greater favor than native-born minorities, especially African Americans (Newman 1999:234).

Despite these troubling conditions, New York has seen a dramatic drop in the welfare rolls. Figure 2 shows that be- tween 1995 and 1998, the population on AFDC dropped from approximately 1.2 million to 810,000 (more than one-half of whom are children). Even before the imposi- tion of time limits, bureaucratic hurdles to access AFDC were increased.6 Workfare became the order of the day, with recipients forced to work in menial jobs lest they lose their benefits. These forces (combined, to be sure, with in- creasing employment opportunities for the more skilled) pushed the welfare rolls down.

If those decreases reflected improving life chances for recipients leaving the rolls, that would be genuine cause for celebration. However, the evidence on post-welfare em- ployment is mixed. Nationwide, it appears that a high pro- portion of former welfare recipients has found work: be- tween 61 and 71 percent according to a recent General Accounting Office survey (Havemann 1999). However, in depressed neighborhoods, the situation may be more prob- lematic. Among the adults who came off the welfare rolls in New York City between July 1996 and March 1997, only 29 percent found full-time or part-time jobs (defined

as earning $100 or more within three months of leaving the rolls) (Hernandez 1998).' The difference suggests, as we might imagine, that the prospects for welfare recipients liv- ing in large urban ghettos are less favorable than they might be for those in smaller towns, suburbs, or rural areas. For people like Dana, however, the news is not comforting. She is not in a very competitive position to find work. Should she be fortunate enough to land something, it is not likely to pay enough to make up for the increased costs she would incur in going to work (child care, transportation, clothing, etc.).8

It is quite likely, given these conditions, that it will take many years of sustained tight labor markets (including se- vere restrictions on low-skilled immigration) before the employment picture for people like Dana will improve. She is much more likely to be among the two-thirds of the city's former AFDC recipients who do not find work at all. Yet, even if Dana escapes this unhappy fate and finds work, her situation is likely to have important conse- quences for the people in her family who, at present, de- pend on her to be home.

For the Linaro family, these figures will have a slightly different meaning. Magdalena has had more education and work experience than Dana, and she does not have very young children to support. There is no one in Magdalena's immediate kin network who depends on her child care services, no one who will be knocked out of the labor mar- ket if she cannot help out. However, the consequence of in- creasing unemployment in Harlem that will almost surely come about as welfare recipients are pushed into a satu- rated labor market is likely to be depressed wages, even for those with some experience. If Magdalena has to drop out of school to find work, she will face a saturated market with sluggish wages. Should her neighborhood suffer a capital outflow, as welfare time limits drain resources from households in poor neighborhoods, the off-the-books in- come of her husband and son may suffer as well.

As this brief account suggests, local conditions make a great deal of difference in understanding the pathways through which time-limited welfare might impact the daily lives of recipients. If Dana and Magdalena lived in Mil- waukee or Boston, where tight labor markets of historic proportions are boosting employment and wages, even for low-skilled workers, they would undoubtedly face very different futures than those likely to unfold in Harlem.

What the Future Holds

This account of welfare reform and its consequences is necessarily speculative. As of the end of our fieldwork pe- riod (in 1997) both Dana and Magdalena had yet to feel the full brunt of welfare reform. Moreover, the personal and network-based resources of poor families will stretch for varying lengths of time even though TANF is the rule of the

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1.2

1

ics ?

0.6-

•" 0.4-

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0 1938 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

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Figure 2. Declining welfare caseloads in New York City. Sources: Human Resources Administration, New York City; Finder 1998: Al; Lombardi 1999:8.

day. Hence, any fully developed ethnographic understanding of its meaning must await the passage of time. Yet it would be worthwhile to consider what issues qualitative researchers should be paying close attention to over the next few years as we seek to make sense of this shift in the policy context.

From a substantive perspective, there are at least two domains that warrant ethnographic attention. First, there are questions we might loosely label "social structural": How has welfare reform affected the internal dynamics of households and families as they confront economic change? A second substantive domain, and one for which anthro- pology has become better known since it took a "symbolic

turn," raises questions of meaning, of the ways that ordi- nary people make sense out of their lives.

The Ecology of Structural Adjustment

The interdependencies in households like Kyesha's are brittle. The whole "system" works when all the pieces are in place: Kyesha's wages are central to the survival of the family, her mother's AFDC and subsidized housing make it possible for the three-generation family to have a roof over its head despite very low income, and Dana's "free" labor makes it possible for Kyesha to remain in the labor force while her son (and Dana's own preschool-aged

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 771

children) are cared for. What will happen to this household if and when Dana re-enters the labor market?

It is unlikely that Dana will find work that pays above the minimum wage. Like the majority of long-term recipi- ents, she has few skills and even fewer credentials (New- man and Lennon 1995; Pavetti 1999). Moreover, given the saturated labor market in her area, Dana will be in compe- tition with people who have more education and recent work experience. The literature we have on the long-term prospects of poorly educated welfare recipients suggests that her wages will not improve measurably with time or work experience (Connolly and Gottschalk n.d.; Pavetti and Acs 1996).

The consequences of prolonged unemployment with no real safety net would be quite catastrophic for Dana and her household. They would be forced to leverage resources from ancillary members of the household or family and friends who have yet to show an abiding interest in their economic well-being. Yet the outcomes for her household if she did find work are not that much more appetizing. Im- mediately, Dana would face child care dilemmas for her own children. Moreover, Kyesha, now securely ensconced in a job she values, might have to quit in favor of a stint on TANF if she cannot find affordable child care, a commod- ity in short supply in New York City. Indeed, recent re- ports from the city's Human Resources Department show that there is a shortage of nearly 30,000 child care slots for children of welfare mothers who are required to enroll in workfare programs (Swarns 1998). The city has a powerful incentive to respond to this crisis; it has no particular in- centive to step up efforts to create child care for someone like Kyesha, who will be struggling to stay in the labor market.

Given these constraints, Kyesha would most likely at- tempt to patch together an arrangement for her son-but probably one that is less reliable and steady than the child care Dana has been able to provide. Undependable child care would have ramifications for Kyesha' s own reliability on the job. She has had a track record as a reliable worker, but if that were to change, her own job security and future mobility would be in question.

The tale of Dana and Kyesha illustrates the need to de- velop a research agenda that focuses not on individuals but on the ecological relations between them, on the dynamics of households, kin groups, and transnational networks of friends and family, in order to understand how the policy changes aimed at one part of this system may unhinge (or possibly boost) the prospects of the others. This in turn re- quires a data collection strategy that emphasizes (at a mini- mum) household groups and the exchange networks in which they are embedded. Other social sciences are un- likely to approach welfare reform this way, particularly when the fate of individuals in the labor market is the pri- mary policy focus.

An anthropological approach should lead to a better un- derstanding of the carrying capacity of social networks. In ecological analyses, the term refers to the limits of popula- tion density that can be sustained in an ecosystem. Exceed- ing these limits usually implies sustained damage. What is the carrying capacity of a social network? How do we measure the buffering capabilities of an extended kinship system, the ability of the social system to absorb or protect its economically vulnerable members? The mere existence of a resource does not guarantee its availability to those who might be in need. Research on class relations in inner- city communities (Anderson 1990; Newman 1995, 1999) suggests that a social gap can open up between the success stories and the "failures" in extended families with many poor members. Families that have been on welfare for a long time are often defined as losers by their more success- ful kin, a stain on the family honor. Moreover, successful families often move out of the ghetto and are geographi- cally separated from their poor relatives. This may mean that their social contact over the years is more limited than the kinship tie might suggest.

This does not mean that more affluent family members refuse all responsibility for the well-being of their strug- gling kin. While some may turn a blind eye on moral grounds or a sense of social superiority, others open the gates. Most part the door a bit, only to discover time and again that the demands on their resources are relentless. If they offered help to everyone among their kin who needs it, they would quickly be overwhelmed.9

Kyesha's family is a case in point. Evie, Kyesha's grandmother, has a stable job with the post office and until relatively recently owned a three-bedroom house in a seg- regated, African American suburb of Long Island. Most of Evie's children are doing well, and few are on AFDC. Still, several of her children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews have fallen on hard times: they have lost jobs, fallen out with spouses, or developed drug problems. For a number of years, Evie took them in, one by one, and sheltered them so that they could regain their balance. The burden was overwhelming. After all, while Evie has a good job by her family's standards, she is not a wealthy woman. She finally gave up her house, sold it off to one of her more successful daughters, and moved into a small apartment, for the ex- press purpose of being able to "say no" when everyone in trouble came calling for her help. Even so, Evie has one of her grown daughters and her children living with her.

From one perspective, then, a "carrying capacity" ap- proach would tell us that there are resources to which Kyesha and Dana could turn if welfare reform destabilized their household and pushed them deeper into poverty. What an ethnographic approach adds, however, are the nu- ances and details that help us understand when a potential resource becomes actual and when it remains out of reach. The mobilization of ties-the relationship between who

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you know and who you can count on-is a topic that other social sciences are likely to neglect, but it is ripe for anthro- pological examination.

Mobilization of bureaucratically controlled resources will also be critical to understanding the successes and fail- ures of families moving off AFDC. Gaining access to new programs that provide medical insurance for children in poor households, job training for adults, and subsidized child care for new entrants to the labor market require in- itiative and energy. We already know that millions fewer families enroll in children's health insurance programs than those that qualify. What we do not know much about are the sources of skepticism, resistance, or bureaucratic barriers that are producing this low "take-up rate." Quality control is a serious problem among low-cost day care providers. Working poor mothers worry that their children are at risk in the only places where they can afford to leave them (Heymann and Earle 1997), a fear that influences la- bor market participation. We do not know whether the threshold of reluctance changes depending on the richness of private supports: grandmothers like Dana, teenaged children who can be pressed into taking care of their young siblings. The relationship between public or private pro- grams and kin-based support structures needs to be exam- ined from every possible angle.

Stalled Adulthood

In most middle-class families, young women and men like Kyesha or Rey would be looking forward to an inde- pendent adulthood in short order. A working girl with five years of experience under her belt should be positioned to make the transition out of her mother's households in the near future. A resourceful young man who has skills in everything from electrical wiring, to carpentry, to fast food would also look forward to his independence. In a better economy, one that paid a living wage to someone like Kyesha, this is probably what would transpire. Yet, be- tween the wage depression that has afflicted the low- skilled labor market and the forces of welfare reform, which cannot help but intensify the downward wage trends in inner-city communities (Bernstein 1997), millions of young adults are likely to find that they cannot "graduate" to adult status. In 1998, approximately 11 percent of the nation's adult children 25-34 years of age lived with a par- ent. Among the Harlem workers and job seekers we stud- ied in the same age group, over 30 percent were living at home. Kyesha can only dream of the day she will have her own apartment and full control over her own life. Even if she did not have a young child whom she must struggle to support, her meager earnings would make it hard to move out of Dana's house and move along the pathway that leads to full-fledged adulthood in this society.

It might be argued that it has always been hard for low- wage workers to graduate to adult independence. In earlier

generations, the problem might have been solved by early marriage. Kyesha's bond to her natal household is only partly a function of limited economic opportunity. It re- flects as well changing norms regarding marriage that make it less likely, among whites and blacks, that low- wage workers will pool their resources and make a go of it on their own. The burdens may be particularly high in ex- pensive cities like New York, where the costs of inde- pendence are especially daunting. With a combined pretax income of $9 an hour, Kyesha and her baby's father would not have been able to afford an independent household even in Harlem."'

The tether that keeps Kyesha by her mother's side and Rey in his family home is only partly tightened by the low wages they earn. Equally important is the need their fami- lies have for their earnings. The experience of working poor youths today echoes much of what we know about the 1930s. It was often young adults, women, and young chil- dren who could find work in the depression-adult males were often the first let go and the last to be rehired when the economy began to revive. Pressures built up in these households to garnish the wages of all the earners present and prevent any of them from leaving the family fold. Carol Stack's All Our Kin (1974) reports a similar phe- nomenon in a poor black community of the Midwest some 30 years ago: much as marriage was valued in general, partners were often torn by the insistent demands of their natal kin for their earnings. A mother who wanted a son's income to remain "in house" would circulate gossip about his intended bride, hoping to undermine the marriage pros- pect. If the end of AFDC means sharp declines in house- hold incomes, we might forecast increasing pressure to hold young adults at home and prevent them from forming independent households.

What will this mean for Kyesha or Rey? If they never have the chance to be on their own, set their own rules, par- ent their children without grandmotherly interference, in short do all the things "normal" adults do as a matter of course, how will this affect their psychological well-being? If such a situation produces increased conflict within Dana's household, what will this mean for Kyesha' s son as he grows up?

Developmental psychologists should have a lot to say about these dynamics. Anthropology can add to our under- standing by focusing on the cultural process of recalibra- tion that periodically redraws the boundaries of adoles- cence. In the more affluent period of the 1970s, the social acceptability of remaining a "dependent" beyond the age of 20 was far less than it may be now that economic oppor- tunities have constricted for youth (Newman 1993). When cultural change of this kind is in the offing, however, it is far from a seamless process. Kyesha is chafing at the limi- tations of her situation because her own generational culture leads her to expect that by this age she should be free of them. We may, however, be observing a new developmental

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 773

pattern of very prolonged adolescence that Kyesha's gen- eration may be forced to contend with. We would do well to explore this issue through age-stratified interview sam- ples that would help to establish expectations, economic realities, and the conflict between them (Newman 1993).

Going West, Going Home

Kyesha and her extended family are descendants of the Great Migration that brought millions of African Ameri- cans out of the rural South to the industrializing North. Kyesha and her family are now rooted in the city and show no signs of looking elsewhere for opportunities. Indeed, given the elaborate support structure that underpins Kyesha's life, she is not even in a position to move to her own apartment in Harlem, much less to another part of the country. Economists tell us that labor market opportunity stimulates migration as workers seek their greatest advan- tage. Yet ethnography tells us that there are multiple "brakes" slowing the outflow of poor families, even when they know opportunities are opening up in other states. We know that single adults are most responsive to these oppor- tunities, for they are least burdened by the demands of fam- ily needs. But the internal migration patterns of poor fami- lies are less well understood-yet they are critical to a full explication of welfare reform's consequences.

Carmen, a Dominican fast food worker who participated in our fieldwork in 1993-94, lived in Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave on the northernmost tip of Manhat- tan. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Carmen came to New York when she was a teenager and finished high school there, all the while working for minimum wage. She is part of a large extended family, comprising some seven or eight households in all, that lived in a single apartment building in the neighborhood. All had arrived in a chain migration fashion and, working as an extended unit, had fostered one another into jobs while spreading re- sponsibility for child care and basic expenses (food and rent) among the 30-40 people who constitute this family network.

By 1998, very few of Carmen's clan were still in Wash- ington Heights. A year before, one of her aunts left New York for Grand Rapids, Michigan, where factories have been reviving at a rapid pace. The aunt called her sisters and brothers weekly once she arrived to tell them about the $17-per-hour jobs that were going begging. Slowly but surely, virtually all of them decamped, children in tow, for the Midwest. The network has now almost entirely recon- stituted itself in Michigan, where family members earn a king's ransom by Dominican standards.

What makes the differences between Carmen's family and Kyesha's? Why do some poor families pull up stakes and head for the gold country, while others remain to face a saturated labor market and limited prospects for the future? Is it just a matter of information? (Kyesha knew nothing

about the Midwest auto factories and their hiring prac- tices.) What role does the availability of an extensive sup- port network play? One might hazard a guess that the wages Carmen's aunt secured were high enough for her to take the risk that she might have to survive without the help of her large family and that only a gap of this magnitude would spur such a migratory pattern. Part of the answer must lie along these economic lines. Yet ethnographic work would probably provide a different set of hypotheses ranging from fear of moving away from an elaborate sup- port network to racial differences that might make an Afri- can American like Kyesha hesitate to move out of Harlem, while a Dominican like Carmen's aunt might feel more comfortable.

Time limits will thrust to the fore questions about the ca- pacity of the low-wage labor market to absorb a large number of unskilled job seekers lacking recent work expe- rience. Central Harlem is not a good place to look for work because it cannot absorb the large number of job seekers who were pounding the pavement before welfare reform. Clearly, anything that would facilitate the capacity of poor workers to move to job-rich or wage-rich areas would make a big difference. Ethnographic work could help pol- icy makers understand better what the barriers to moving might be. What role does information play? How big a wage differential is needed before families can afford to risk the loss of support networks? Is the problem wage rates, job stability, or both? How deep are the cultural at- tachments to inner-city neighborhoods where the job mar- ket is the worst?

Remittances sent by family members from the United States to family members in their countries of origin amounted to some $70 billion earlier in this decade. While much, if not most, of this money is earned through hard la- bor, presumably the welfare system played some role. If welfare reform cuts the income in households that used to send money abroad, how will this impact migration flows? What will the consequences of a sharp drop in income be for the economic viability of households in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, and a host of other coun- tries that depend on remittances? For Carmen, who went on welfare for a short time to access health benefits during a problematic pregnancy, the loss of these resources would have had an immediate impact on her extended family: the remittances she sends every week to her mother in the Do- minican Republic would have dried up.

Families with overseas ties that find themselves in dire straits in cities like New York may send their children "home" to be raised. We know this happens even now among parents who cannot afford to live in safe neighbor- hoods and those who are suspicious of American culture and want their kids raised in more traditional settings (Stack 1996; Waters 2001). Welfare reform may cause an increase in migratory children. Ethnographers working

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with immigrant populations need to bear these possibilities in mind if we are to understand how welfare reform inter- sects migration.

The Fate of Men

While welfare reform obviously targeted mainly moth- ers, men were the subject of the child support enforcement provisions. These efforts to enforce fiscal responsibility have caught the attention of many governors who see de- linquent fathers as a revenue source that can stem the out- flow of tax dollars for dependent children. Yet we know that there is a real limit to what we can expect (extract?) from poor fathers, who are most often the absent parents of children in poverty-level single-parent families (Garfinkle et al. 1998; Johnson et al. 1999).

What, then, might we expect to see happen to men, if anything, as a consequence of welfare reform? Men-es- pecially young black men-have borne a special burden as a result of declining demand for low-skilled workers (Os- terman 1980). They tend to have less education than women; employers take a dim view of them as potential workers (Wilson 1997). My fieldwork suggests that even in the underground economy, the legal means of earning a living tend to be predominantly in the hands of women (hair braiding, baby-sitting, etc.) while unskilled men are often deeded over to the high-risk illegal occupations (principally the drug trade [Bourgois 1996])." The wide divergence of outcomes among siblings points to the diffi- culties men face: Among Kyesha's siblings and step sibs, a few men have made it into the military. Most have ended up on the wrong side of the law and, partly as a result, are estranged from their natal family. Her sisters, on the other hand, have largely found employment in the formal econ- omy or are doing typical under-the-counter women's work.

As William Hawkeswood's (1997) ethnographic work shows, black gay men often do step into the gap and work hard to help their sisters and aunts take care of children. They are often a mainstay in Harlem households. Straight men like Rey and his father-steady earners in both the above- and below-ground economy-are also central sup- ports in working poor families. But among those men who cannot provide a steady contribution to the collective pot (legal or illegal), we will no doubt find many who are re- jected outright by the "sharing networks" that poor fami- lies depend on for day-to-day survival (Edin n.d.; Newman 1999). With welfare out of the picture, it may become too costly to maintain a dependent male population.

What will they do instead? Very little of the current re- search on welfare reform is focusing on men, with the ex- ception of projects looking to understand the employment behavior of noncustodial fathers (who, by definition, are not in the target households). There are other important questions to be asked about poor men and the households

in which they live. What is happening to the older sons, brothers, and unemployed or underemployed fathers in families that once received welfare? In cities with tight la- bor markets, there is evidence to show that they are being absorbed into the labor market at levels not seen for 30 years (Freeman 1999), though unemployment continues to be far higher for black men than for whites or Latinos at all levels of educational attainment. Among those who find work, we may see greater resolve to stick with it if the safety net below them and their children wears too thin. Men (and women) may dedicate themselves to building up more human capital. (Indeed, we already see increasing rates of high school graduation in cities like New York.) It is also possible, gender norms notwithstanding, that we will find more men involved in child care-either of their own children or of the kids in their extended families-as women are pressed into the labor market. There is some evidence for an increasing trend toward male involvement in child rearing among middle-class families (Barnett 1996; Lewin 1998).

Most of all, we need to pay attention to increasing ten- sion between the financial needs of common-law partners and those of the natal families from which noncustodial fa- thers come. Juan and Kyesha are a case in point. On the strength of his minimum-wage job, Juan has been able to make fairly consistent, albeit very limited, contributions to the support of their son. He also contributes to the support of his own mother's household. What will happen when his mother hits her time limits and Kyesha's mother does the same? Juan will be torn even more than he was before between the increased need of his (own) mother's house- hold and that of his child's.

Welfare Reform and the Culture of Poor Communities

If financial burdens were the motive force behind policy change, welfare reform would surely have been low on the list of priorities. Less than 5 percent of total government expenditures went to the poor with cash, food, and housing assistance rolled together, with the bulk of this expenditure lodged in Supplemental Security Income and housing, rather than TANF (Congressional Budget Office 2000). Middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medi- care are a far more serious source of budget strain. But this is clearly not what was driving the welfare reform debate. In an era when millions of middle- and working-class mothers of young children have joined the labor force, it has become politically awkward to provide state support so that the nonworking poor can stay at home. This, plus the ever present American distaste for public support of the "undeserving poor," provided the political muscle behind reform. The convictions of liberal reformers that the wel- fare system had broken down into an eligibility and check- writing operation and needed to be resurrected as a job- training and placement operation added to the mix. As

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David Ellwood (1996) has explained, liberal reformers were caught in the oncoming headlights of a conservative Congress in 1994, which stripped most of the training and public service employment carrots while preserving the stick of time limits.

At the end of the day, the message that emerged was one that emphasized the traditional American preoccupation with work as a moral obligation. The cultural question we need to answer now is how that message was received. What did the poor families on welfare understand by this new regime? And how does their interpretation of the pol- icy mission change their behavior, if at all?

Do they accept the conservative view that "we" are try- ing to "help them get out of poverty"? Do they embrace the liberal view that we are "making war on the poor"? Is wel- fare sufficiently stigmatized for recipients to want to do al- most anything to get off of it anyway? Or does that stigma lack the bite it once had, appeal only to a few, or make no difference because the labor market does not offer a mean- ingful alternative? Mark Rank's (1995) study of welfare offices and recipients suggests that welfare recipients al- ready detest the whole enterprise and prefer to work. A goodly number of them suffer physical disabilities that make work difficult, have children with chronic illnesses that require attention, or face wages that are too low to make a go of it. But his research was conducted in the con- text of an AFDC system that is no longer with us. We need to go back to this drawing board to see whether the per- sonal calculus has changed.

Our Harlem fieldwork suggests a significant penetration of social science models and concepts into the ordinary vo- cabulary and "folk analysis" poor people offer in conversa- tion about their own lives. Ideas about role models, about deprivation and its consequences, and about values are all common parlance on 125th Street now. This language is often invoked by the poor to explain the twists of fate that have brought them to where they are. Ethnographic work to date suggests that welfare recipients share with the rest of the country a cultural orientation that emphasizes the dignity of work and the "flip side" of the Protestant ethic, the denigration of the "dependent" (de Parle 1999; Edin and Lein 1997; Rank 1995). Certainly their close cousins, the already working poor, have bought into a highly con- demnatory language of blame that focuses on the moral weakness of welfare recipients (including members of their own families) (Newman 1999). Whether these orien- tations persist in the face of welfare reform-which termi- nates benefits even when there are dependent children in the balance or parents who are unable to find work-is an open question. There is clearly more to be discovered about whether or to what extent the message being sent by the government, by the comfortable citizenry, is the mes- sage being received.

Marriage and Childbearing Behavior

There is very little evidence to date to suggest that mar- riage or childbearing behavior shifts as a consequence of policy changes. David Ellwood's (1988:60-61) influential book, Poor Support, showed long ago that AFDC had no influence on the growth of single-parent families and that the highest percentages of children in female-headed fami- lies were in the states with the lowest benefits. He argued quite convincingly then that changes in family structure were largely unrelated to the social policies that underlie welfare. The ethnographic evidence supports his perspec- tive. From Eli Anderson's (1990) work on "baby clubs,""2 to Bell Kaplan's (1997) work on teenaged mothers,13 to Stack's (1974) findings on childbearing,14 there is a moun- tain of evidence pointing away from economic incentives and toward emotional satisfaction as an explanation for out-of-wedlock birth.

While all of this work refutes the notion that welfare plays much of a role in the motivations for having a child, it must be said that this research was all done under one set of economic conditions: welfare enabled young, unskilled mothers a way to manage (albeit at a very meager level). Noncustodial fathers were virtually absent from the policy landscape, save efforts to increase child support (which is unlikely to have an enormous impact on men who are al- ready poor). Nonetheless, while welfare was not a motive force, it would be fair to say it was certainly an important contextual feature that made it feasible, though not com- fortable, to satisfy the desire for parenthood without facing the worst consequences of homelessness and total depriva- tion.

Will the converse, the end of welfare, create disincen- tives that are powerful enough to dissuade single women from becoming pregnant (especially if their own mothers have to work as well and are therefore not available for child care)? Perhaps no single goal was more powerful among conservative welfare reformers than this. Were they correct in assuming that the incentives could be shifted so sharply that a major change in childbearing be- havior would follow? We do not know. Recognizing that welfare is not a carrot that induces out-of-wedlock birth does not tell us what happens when the "sticks" are this significant. Past evidence does not lead one to imagine that the differences will be profound, but it is possible that the negative incentives were not powerful enough to yield that outcome.

Conclusion

There is clearly much to be learned about the intersec- tion of welfare reform and the daily lives of both those who are the direct targets of policy intervention and those who are bystanders. As the case studies of Kyesha's and Rey's extended families suggest, welfare recipients, the working

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poor, their more advantaged kin, and the many institutions they participate in-from schools to bureaucratic agen- cies-are caught in the changing tide. There is no reason to expect that the outcomes will be uniform. Some families that have been hit by time limits will prosper, some will fall apart, and the vast majority will probably trade a life of poverty on welfare for what may be a harder life of work- ing poverty.

It would be wrong to begin with the assumption that per- sonal characteristics will explain who does well and who does not. While not discounting the impact of personal his- tory and experience, anthropological wisdom teaches that social structures will be at least, if not more, important. We must launch studies that will help to explain why outcomes vary by race and ethnicity, how states that have been gen- erous with child care and medical care differ from "mean" states, what impact labor market conditions have on the prospects of low-skilled parents to find and keep work, and the buffering role of multigenerational and transnational ties for families undergoing financial distress.

And all of this has to be studied over time. It will take a year or two beyond the time limits for the resources of most families and their networks to run aground. We will not know how they have adapted in any final way for some time. And, of course, the consequences for children can take many years to take their toll, positive or negative. What we do know for sure is that the story of welfare re- form cannot end with the recognition that the rolls are dropping dramatically. Until we know what has become of families like those described here, we will not understand what the consequences of welfare reform have been.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Support for this research was gener- ously provided by the Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Ford, Spencer, William T. Grant, MacArthur, and National Science Foundations, as well as the Foundation for Child Develop- ment. Comments from Greg Duncan, Lindsay Chase- Lansdale, and Christopher Jencks greatly improved this work.

1. The field research team worked on the shop floor of the four restaurants for over four months, learning the jobs and observing the workers who were among the "shadowees" while at work. Managers and business owners entered the fieldwork at close range during this part of the project.

2. Studies have shown that rapid informalization has oc- curred in a number of New York City industries, including construction (where an estimated 90 percent of the internal work is done without permits) and the furniture, footwear, and garment industries (Portes and Sassen-Koob 1986; Sassen- Koob 1988).

3. The severe local decline in the formal manufacturing sector has spurred opportunities for small-scale immigrant en- trepreneurs, especially in low-wage apparel subcontracting (see Waldinger 1986).

4. This is but a distal measure of labor market saturation. To measure this more accurately, one would need to know the

total number of job seekers and the total number of jobs they were after. Among the 14 people applying for every one of these fast food jobs, most were applying for multiple jobs, and their search patterns ranged well beyond Harlem's borders. See Newman 1999 for more detail.

5. It is not clear that fast food workers living on Long Is- land were therefore better off. There is no public housing in these suburban communities, and private rents exceed those in subsidized city housing. The private housing markets are probably comparable; indeed, city rents, even in ghetto neigh- borhoods, are probably higher than many suburban rentals.

6. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1971) describe this kind of bureaucratic tightening evidence for the "restric- tive cycle" of welfare, which, they argue, tends to develop when unemployment falls. They suggest that the state's role in the stabilization of capitalism favors market discipline, which is aided by making welfare harder to access.

7. This study does not track flow into underground econ- omy, those who left the state, or those working for employers who delay in reporting their new payroll entrants; hence, it may understate job finding. Yet it defines "working" as any- one who earned $100 in the three months following exit from the rolls. This threshold is so low that it probably exaggerates employment.

8. Indeed, this is the point made so well by Edin and Lein (1997). Many of the welfare mothers they interviewed had dropped out of the low-wage labor market because they were poorer while at work than they were on AFDC. Making such an alternative impossible is clearly one of the goals of welfare reform, which is another way of imposing the market disci- pline Fox Piven and Cloward (1971) discuss.

9. Carol Stack's classic work, All Our Kin (1974), illus- trates this point. One of her main characters inherits a modest sum of money and is instantly besieged by requests for assis- tance from her many less fortunate friends and family mem- bers. Not wishing to disconnect herself from the sharing net- works on which she depends, she begins to respond to their requests, and within a short period the money has evaporated.

10. I am not aware of recent studies that concentrate on the impact of economic constraints on maturation in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This was an important topic of investi- gation during the Great Depression, when severe unemploy- ment forced many young adults back into the arms of their families. Some of the sociological classics of that era-The Unemployed Man and His Family (Komarovsky 1940), Mari- enthal (Jahoda et al. 1933)-explore at length the increasing frustration in working-class households as the expectations of whole generations were exploded by economic constraints.

11. This fate did not befall Rey because his father was able to teach him some valuable craft skills.

12. Anderson (1990) argues that young women are drawn to childbearing for the status it gives them with respect to fe- male peers. They create "baby clubs" so that they can admire the clothing of their infants as a group.

13. Bell Kaplan (1997) suggests that young girls have ba- bies because they feel estranged from men, isolated from their mothers, and generally emotionally abandoned. They are looking for someone to "love me back" and have babies to find that anchor.

NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 777

14. Stack (1974) suggests that very young girls are looking to improve their status in their households, to move up out of childhood to a rank that carries its own bedroom, for example. Children from those early years are most likely to be raised by their grandmothers and to think of their biological mothers as something like sisters. She argues that in later years, young women look much like their middle-class counterparts: they have children inside marriage and adopt the usual mothering role.

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